What interests you? This is a question I have by mulling over (with one of my best friends) during our annual November retreat. And just today, we also introduced the notion of (grammatical) subjects and objects of attention into the mix of ideas.
He is fully aware of what has been not only fully but also increasingly the focus of my attention over the past several decades, namely so-called natural language. I recall how just about a year ago I was chatting in a bar with some new acquaintances coming from academic circles … particularly how I drew attention to natural language by contrasting it with the newfangled notion of artificial languages.
But I digress … .
Today many people find things like IG or YT or whatever platform interesting — and I wonder what these people find interesting about these things. If I was to be informed of some natural disaster, or a similarly significant “world event”, would I care whether such information arrived via IG or YT or whatever else (maybe “X”)? I have long held while “content is king”, context is queen (and that she wears the pants) … yet what is the contextual information provided by the beloved platforms which the herds and masses of men (and women) flock to in order to check out “what’s going on?” [1]
In my humble opinion, the only thing these so-called platforms bring to the contextual equations is rules and regulations about things that are allowed to happen on the platform (or not). In this vein, the corresponding platform audiences self-select into buckets and categories of attention limits — in other words: mostly self-imposed attention limits. Some people might even go so far as to say these various platforms are selected in acts of self-censorship.
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